Brandon Smith who developed Ensign-1 and Helena the 3rd, now wants to include a multiplayer to his latest game. For this he started a Kickstarter project in which you can not only help Brandon fund multiplayer, but also buy his games at a much cheaper price ! The goal is only $1,500 so it’s very [...]

OpenMW 0.14 has been released [blog announcement] half a month ago.

I'm a fan of commented video changelogs and highly recommend theirs (embedded below)!

As an experiment, I created an audio-only version [ogg Vorbis, 4m12s, 3M] using youtube-dl, ffmpeg and sox, in case you prefer that over YouTube.

video: OpenMW 0.14 Commented Changelog

This post was retrieved from freegamer.blogspot.com.

Four Dust Racing screenshots (not split-screen!), pink player against yellow AI cars
Dust Racing (Dustrac) is a tile-based, cross-platform 2D racing game written in Qt (C++) and OpenGL. Dustrac comes with a Qt-based level editor for easy level creation. A separate engine, MiniCore, is used for physics modeling. CMake is used as the build system.
Planting trees on the road in Dustrac's Qt-based level editor
Graphics are SVG-based (sources included) and and the editor is simple and has a flat learning curve. GPLv3 is named as the license, no special license is named for the graphics, so the same might apply.

Dustrac's controls feel smooth and I love the object physics and the visualization of the trees.

This post was retrieved from freegamer.blogspot.com.

Legends of Eisenwald is a kickstarter project in the latest stages of development, and as the goal of $50,000 is achieved – it should be out by the end of the year. The game is inspired by titles like HoMM3, King’s Bounty and Disciples 1-2. The developers already stated that a GNU/Linux client will be [...]

Jensen, the creator behind Gabriel Knight and Gray Matter adventure games as well as King’s Quest VI and her husband, opened a new game studio called “Pinkerton Road” that will be solely focused on story-driven, 3rd person adventure games. The first game they are creating is Moebius. Story : Malachi Rector is an antiquities dealer [...]

From Phil Hassey who brought you the addictive game Galcon Fusion comes it’s latest release – Dynamite Jack which is a new stealth game with …bombs ! It seems like an action oriented, finished version of it’s abandoned prototype Stealth Target (which was also very promising). Dynamite Jack Trailer Screenshots And it’s only $5 !

Today is another session of: "Look what I found in my FG spam folder" ;) But this time I am actually adding a lot of nice other stuff to it, so that it is almost a "dev-corner" post!

But first things first... the frogatto developers made us aware that there is a new game based on their really nice 2D engine, called Cube Trains:


Cube Trains Beta gameplay
Note that, just like frogatto, the final version will cost a few pennies, but the engine is totally FOSS and the current Beta is still free to download.

This seems to fit to the general idea of the folks behind this engine as they outlined in the email to us:
I'm really glad we now have a second major title done in frogatto's engine, because we're gradually trying to position frogatto's engine as an open-source alternative to closed-source packages like GameMaker or RPGMaker;  partly just because development tools are one software category that benefits far more than other categories from being open-source, but also because our engine technology is a lot better than GameMaker;  we're fully GPU-accelerated, and we've got a much better internal programming language.  We've got a ways to go, since GameMaker still has a bunch of advantages over us on the gui side, but we're getting there.

Cube Trains is not one of them, but eventually, we're hoping to build a stable of "starter kits" for different game types - like GameMaker has, built under a CC0 license so they're suitable not just for GPL games, but for absolutely anything (indie titles being a big one).  Hopefully that was we can get a bunch of people from the indie gaming crowd behind an open-source tool.Which seems like a pretty good idea to me, and looking at the awesome features they recently showcased in three tutorials (1,2,3) I wholeheartedly agree with the comment on their superior engine technology!

Speaking of the frogatto engine and tutorials I can elegantly lead to my other topic today, as the people behind the currently pre-warming Liberated Pixels Cup, aka our friends from OpenGameArt, are also endorsing the use of that engine as outlined here. The have also recently featured another really nice 2D game dev. tile editor, and hot of the press is the news that the Mozilla foundation has joined the FSF and Creative Commons as a main sponsor of the event!
With Mozilla also came a significant cash contribution, which means that the initial goal of US$ 10,000 has been reached, but you can still up the ante!

It seems that this comes along a general push from the Mozilla Foundation towards more HTML5 gaming (now part of the LPC too), supported by the fact that they have recently released a nice RPG game demo (BrowserQuest) and are working even on a 3D engine called Gladius.

Ah and not to forget: OGA has also recently added a nice featured tutorial section to their site... so nothing is holding you back to finally become an active part of the FOSS game-development community... yes, I said YOU! :D

This post was retrieved from freegamer.blogspot.com.

Post-Soviet Adventure's protagonist cleaning up the inventory
The story of GameLV: Adventure Game in Post Soviet Environment (Post-Soviet Adventure) begins with your dog having gone missing and your only lead being a meat product factory. For about one hour you point-and-click through pre-rendered environments, hunt pixels, read humorous descriptions and dialogues to reach a resolution.

I for one appreciate the humor in AGiPSE's humor, which I might have a high affinity to due to do my roots in Russia and my life taking place in eastern Berlin most of its time.

Be warned though: references to drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, pornography and violence are common in this game.

Post-Soviet Adventure is available in English and Latvian languages, both text and voice, although the English voices are incomplete.

video: [English Voices] Adventure in Post Soviet Environment (GameLV) by snauts (Artūrs Grebstelis)
The engine features savegames and scene animations and uses image masks to set define interactive areas. Text files seem to be used for defining the game.

To use voices, see following note:

So here is GameLV HEAD from our local repo with half way done english speech that has terrible pronunciation and was abandoned. http://piepe.lv/game-lv/assemble.tgz
That "assemble" is the same as "data" directory on https://github.com/snauts/GameLV, just put your binary in there and run.
P.S. My uplink to foreign countries is slow, so it should take a while for you download it. [mediafire mirror]
P.S.S If you want to run latvian version issue (in assemble directory)
sed "s/\-en//" *.lst -i
UI will still be in english because UI strings are compiled into engine.Both code and art are freely licensed and the very nice music was even written and performed for the game. Some sounds have unknown sources though and finding freely licensed replacements on Freesound and OpenGameArt would be a way to contribute to the project.

This post was retrieved from freegamer.blogspot.com.

YAMC? Yet another Minecraft clone??? Well Terasology (previously called "Moving Blocks") sure looks like one:


Terasology alpha gameplay
But besides looking like a pretty good YAMC, it actually promises to deviate from the boring Minecraft routine and mentions the pretty well liked games Dwarf Fortress and Dungeon Keeper as inspirations for its planned game-play :)

Code is under the Apache license, however the current pixel textures are non-free. But if this takes off, those should be relatively easy to replace with really free ones ;)
Oh and you can run it via Java directly from your browser (I had a black void as a world under Linux though... so your mileage might vary also).

This post was retrieved from freegamer.blogspot.com.

infraRed let us know about his game project, gFifteen: I coded a GTK+ based implementation of the old puzzle game Fifteen. It is a fun and challenging little diversion, with multiple attractive tile sets to choose from. RPMs and Debs are available for 32 and 64 bit platforms!

The Razer Nostromo is a gaming mini-keyboard that provides remapping of keys to any keyboard or mouse event. This is great; however, the drivers are only available for OSX and Windows. Not anymore, the jnostromo project aims to provide GNU/Linux drivers that provides E-Sport legal keymappings for Linux gamers everywhere. The feature set is similar [...]

Thanks to arvd for sending this in! FleetCOMM : Operation Vigrior is a Kickstarter indie game worth checking out. It’s a real-time strategy game introducing a novel gameplay mechanic. Instead of fumbling over disorganized blobs of units, the player controls a synchronized squad of ships. They’ve been very supportive of Linux game development; they already [...]

A new development release of Wine has been announced. This release being 1.5.3 has the following changes: Support for graphics bounds tracking. A number of fixes to the builtin Internet Explorer. Support for displaying ARM code in the Wine debugger. Various DirectMusic improvements. Better namespace support in MSXML. Various bug fixes Download: [ Wine 1.5.3 [...]

OpenGameArt's texture section just received an update. There now is a category tree and files from texture packs are also available as single nodes (pages/description/downloads).

You can see some discussion about the new features on the official announcement's comments.

This post was retrieved from freegamer.blogspot.com.

Phoronix’s Michael Larabel has posted a (somewhat defensive, given his past coverage) article relating his experiences at Valve Software, where founder Gabe Newell revealed that the lauded studio is actively porting both their game distribution platform Steam and a Source-engine title, Left 4 Dead 2, to Linux. There’s (understandably) no current public ETA, but very [...]

Ex Eidos, Digital Reality, Most Wanted Entertainment, 3D Brigade, Glass Fish Games employees decided the reunite and for a new game company called 4Flash. Their first title which is in development for 2 years now is the C&C and Sudden Strike inspired, real time strategy game “Sword Of Justice“. Sadly it currently looks that they [...]

There’s a new Humble Indie Bundle on the scene, just in time for Earth Day: We’re debuting the brand new game, Botanicula, for Windows, Mac, and Linux! In Amanita Design’s latest adventure/puzzle game, you must guide a motley band of tree creatures in a journey to save their home from brooding, parasitic invaders. Buying the [...]

Here’s the word from Cheese! Last month, I published a lengthy shallow analysis of the comparative purchase, revenue and average statistics for Humble Bundle promotions. I recently updated the article to include additional quotes from a top Humble Bundle contributor and explore some additional figures as well as the notion that the high Linux average [...]

eihrul has announced Tesseract on the Cube Engine forums, which adds these features to the venerable FPS platform: deferred shading HDR rendering with tonemapping and bloom omnidirectional point-light shadowmaps sunlight cascaded shadowmap screen-space ambient occlusion screen-space water reflections (no more reflection plane limits) refractive alpha cubes refractive glass material The actual code is at a [...]

Tomes of Mephistopheles, a dungeon hack/slash game in alpha testing, is now at version 0.07a. Changes include savegame functionality and AI obstacle clearing. The patch is available by logging in to the Kot in Action E-Shoppe.